A new CMO with a new events lead, a venue they inherited with two months to show; no budget confirmed, no creative direction, no sense yet of what “good” looks like. Just a date and a room.
What do you do when the client can’t tell you what they want?
The brief you’re waiting for isn’t coming. Some clients are disorganized but most of the time they genuinely cannot produce clarity in the abstract. They need to see something and react to it, and that reaction is the data you’ve been trying to extract from them in every kickoff call and intake form they’ve ever left half-finished.
Build the Brief Yourself
The solution is to put something real in front of them: a theme concept, a program flow, a design direction. Watch what gets approved immediately, and watch even more carefully for the hard “no,” because that’s usually the most useful thing a client says in the first month of a project.
A few years ago we were brought in on a pharmaceutical conference: new CMO and zero creative direction. So we ran the process: we gave them three theme options, logo concepts, a program flow, speaker assignments, a stage design, and opening video references. Much of it got approved on the spot; some got nixed. Those weren’t necessarily wins and losses; every “yes” and “no” told us something the client hadn’t been able to articulate before they saw it. That was the brief we’d been waiting for.
This process is time-intensive and expensive on our end, and it’s not how I’d design a client engagement if I had a choice, but some briefs can’t be written in advance.
Make Sure the Options Are Real
Not long ago, we were in a competitive bid. The client had been shopping around, and at some point came back and showed us some renders done by another firm. “Can you do something like that?”
We pulled up the renders; none of it was actionable.
What the competing firm had given them was a curved wall that wouldn’t survive their actual program: a series of close-range technical demonstrations where every person needed a direct sightline to a small screen. Their lighting design was double any realistic budget. They had a stage layout that assumed load-in time that didn’t exist. It was a beautiful proposal built entirely on assumptions that had never been stress-tested against anything.
When we present options — tier one, tier two, tier three — every one of them is buildable. We’ve already done the scenario planning: we know what the labor looks like, what the scenic solution requires, how the rigging installs in the time available, which tier the budget actually supports.
The difference between a creative partner and a vendor who sells beautiful problems is whether your options are buildable before you put them in the room. If they can’t survive contact with reality, you’re not generating a brief — you’re generating a fantasy.
Pick a number, any number
Maybe the client doesn’t have a brief, they aren’t sure of the goals, and just don’t have any inspiration. Well, there’s a sure-fire way to get the creative juices flowing: pick a budget number. There’s something that happens when a client gets specific, even when the specifics are hard.
First, the whole world of possibilities narrows down significantly. Something I learned in independent filmmaking is that you can make the same movie for $100 million or $100. It’s up to the artist to find ways to deliver the story at the budget they’ve got. And we do this in event production too. Telling me you’ve got $10K vs $100K changes the conversation materially and quickly gets us to a place where we can rule out/in all sort of possibilities.
One of the more liberating experiences I’ve ever had as a producer was when a long-term client came in saying: here is the number. Not a range. Not a hedge. That was it. There will be no upsells, no add-ons, no coming back after the fact with something we forgot to scope. This is the number; everybody’s job depends on it.
This is great. A real number can be better than a high number.
Even if it’s tight, every vendor conversation from that point forward is grounded in something real: every scenic solution, every labor call, every equipment decision. We can stop working around a target we weren’t sure about and start engineering against one we know is fixed. We can tell vendors no. Instead of spinning our wheels on endless proposals for added budget or extras, we can find alternatives and approvals instantly.
When the brief doesn’t exist, the work is to create the conditions for one. Put real options on the table. Make sure they’re buildable. Get honest about the money. Clarity rarely arrives fully formed; most of the time, you have to produce it.